Such methods are used at present in telecommunications systems operated by the applicant to transmit and temporarily store service information in the form of context or profile information relating to a user of the system accompanying data sent by that user. The elements that are called “data” here usually form an essential body of the call, which, in the current state of the art, is in principle initiated by said user. This data can consist of data representing a speech signal and/or a video signal produced by the user, for example. The context or profile information can consist of a geographical location or a list of areas of interest specific to this user, for example.
In the current state of the art, a telecommunications system making use of the method described above includes a main communications network, such as a switched telephone network, adapted to connect a terminal made available to the user to a first server, referred to as the upstream server, identified as the first addressee of a call that the user has initiated, for example by entering a predetermined code on an alphanumeric keypad of the terminal. For example, the first server could be a voice server adapted to receive a verbal enquiry from the user and to route that enquiry, and therefore the call in progress, to a second server, referred to as the downstream server, that the upstream server has identified as supporting a service adapted to address the enquiry formulated by the user.
In the known system, if the upstream server reroutes the call to the downstream server, the upstream server can store the service information beforehand in a particular location of a memory space in an auxiliary server and send an address identifying said particular location via a signaling link provided for this purpose. In this instance, that address is formed by the combination of an IP (Internet Protocol) address assigned to the auxiliary server and an address of a memory port internal to said auxiliary server where the service information is actually stored.
In the current state of the art, no particular precautions are implemented relative to the auxiliary server assigning port addresses, with the result that a port address could be reassigned during a session to a third party element external to the current session. By writing new data at the port address concerned, that third party element could then overwrite service information originally stored at that port address.
Moreover, the inventors have found that, in the current state of the art, if a session is defined as a string of successive activations of different communications means, for example the terminal of the user and the upstream and downstream servers referred to above, service information stored by one of these communications means is linked to those means and is liable to disappear very quickly after those means have ceased to be involved in the current session. However, when a session is defined in the manner proposed by the inventors, it must be possible for a user to interrupt a call without the session itself being interrupted, so that in this situation servers such as the upstream and downstream servers referred to above can take over and proceed with processing data supplied by the user while there is no connection, before calling the user back to provide the results of processing the data. In known telecommunications systems such continuity of the current session cannot be accompanied by continuity of the service information, which means that at present conducting communications sessions where one or more of the parties involved could be disconnected temporarily or permanently cannot be envisaged without this interrupting the data processing system.
Generally speaking, in known telecommunications systems, there is therefore no guarantee as to the permanence of service information stored in the auxiliary server. Furthermore, if during a session one of the entities involved instructs dynamic storage of service information additional to service information previously stored by the same entity, no link can be established between the additional service information and that stored previously, although in theory such a link would be useful for the addressees of the information, who might need to process all of the service information simultaneously, for example, which processing would then be facilitated by grouping the information together.